I love this post. I have been screaming at my monitor now for several years. Something shifted about 5 years ago in UX and everything has definitely gotten worse since.
When Google Docs started to bring back a traditional menu display in the top bar, I was so excited. Everything felt normal and it was easy to find what I was looking for.
But the rest of Google Drive is a disaster. Sometimes buttons are in the upper left, sometimes lower left. Recently they moved the “Add new document” button to the lower right and I spent forever trying to find it. It is infuriating that there is not intelligent person at a company of that size who can put a stop to this crap.
I really hate to say this, but I think a lot of UX designers are trying to justify their existence by reinventing things that have already been solved.
The reality is once you decide how a dropdown or a text input works on desktop, there is very little reason to reinvent it. Ever.
Stop reinventing things UX engineers: your small usability study with 3 of your friends who got confused for 5 seconds is not a sign that you should reinvent how to select things in a list.
When Google Docs started to bring back a traditional menu display in the top bar, I was so excited. Everything felt normal and it was easy to find what I was looking for.
But the rest of Google Drive is a disaster. Sometimes buttons are in the upper left, sometimes lower left. Recently they moved the “Add new document” button to the lower right and I spent forever trying to find it. It is infuriating that there is not intelligent person at a company of that size who can put a stop to this crap.
I really hate to say this, but I think a lot of UX designers are trying to justify their existence by reinventing things that have already been solved.
The reality is once you decide how a dropdown or a text input works on desktop, there is very little reason to reinvent it. Ever.
Stop reinventing things UX engineers: your small usability study with 3 of your friends who got confused for 5 seconds is not a sign that you should reinvent how to select things in a list.
/endrant